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Re: The Genesis Torpedo Should Have Tipped Over When Reliant Was Blast

TREK_GOD_1 wrote:

Navigator_NCC2120 wrote:

Well, in the second pilot episode of TOS, Gary Mitchell was unconscious but he was held in place standing on the transporter pad before he was beamed down to Delta Vega. Here is a picture of it. So I suppose Khan used the same feature/function of the transporter to hold the Genesis Torpedo in place as a precaution.

Probably the best in-universe answer dating all the way to the beginning.

Re: The Genesis Torpedo Should Have Tipped Over When Reliant Was Blast

Another small irritant about this scene, in a movie that I otherwise love: Why didn't the Enterprise just pummel the Reliant with photon torpedoes and blow it up quickly instead of crawling away? The Genesis torpedo was clearly not ready to detonate since it was on a "build up", so it couldn't have been prematurely triggered in the process. Otherwise Khan would have rushed it himself. No one would have had to go into the irradiated engineering room. I think I just answered my own question there.

Re: The Genesis Torpedo Should Have Tipped Over When Reliant Was Blast

The Genesis torpedo was clearly not ready to detonate since it was on a "build up", so it couldn't have been prematurely triggered in the process. Otherwise Khan would have rushed it himself.

It's quite possible that the Genesis device becomes lethal the moment the final button is pushed, and has to be left alone for an additional few minutes to also become useful (i.e. be capable of creating new worlds) in addition to already being lethal. If the sensors of the Enterprise already read the "Genesis waveform", it makes sense that this deadly thing is being kept bottled up and its release would be fatal.

Indeed, we don't know whether the build-up sequence ever finishes, or whether the Reliant just happens to blow up, triggering a premature release of the Genesis wave (and thus contributing to the instability of the end result).

As for Khan, he probably understood next to nothing about the device. He might have preferred to blow up the Reliant on Kirk's face, but he didn't know how to scuttle the ship. So he used the weapon he had already primed and learned to detonate.

Note how in "Space Seed", when intruder control gas is released and all is lost, Khan reaches Engineering - but apparently wastes several precious minutes looking up a way to slowly scuttle the ship, allowing Kirk to catch up. It's pretty natural for a superman to fail to study in advance the measures needed at defeat...

(What was Khan doing there at the conclusion of "Space Seed", though? Was he really committing suicide of a particularly spiteful sort? Or did he have a plan of blackmailing Kirk with the slow self-destruct? He certainly failed to make use of such a plan!)

Re: The Genesis Torpedo Should Have Tipped Over When Reliant Was Blast

Kahn ordered the annular confinement beam to be left in place after transport to act as a low level kinetic forcefield to both keep the device in place and be a barrier for anyone attempting to touch it or tamper with it, and prevent it being beamed back off the Reliant by the Enterprise.

Re: The Genesis Torpedo Should Have Tipped Over When Reliant Was Blast

KarmicCurse wrote:

Another small irritant about this scene, in a movie that I otherwise love: Why didn't the Enterprise just pummel the Reliant with photon torpedoes and blow it up quickly instead of crawling away? The Genesis torpedo was clearly not ready to detonate since it was on a "build up", so it couldn't have been prematurely triggered in the process. Otherwise Khan would have rushed it himself. No one would have had to go into the irradiated engineering room. I think I just answered my own question there.

This thing can create planets.

Best thing is just to get the hell out of there.

A couple of Photon Torpedos aren't going to do too much. We've no idea what's inside. Firing torpedos might even set it off.

I did once wonder whether you could beam over to the reliant and then beam out the genesis device to the limit of the transporter range in the opposite direction to buy you extra time but you might not be able to get a lock once the device is active.

Damn, I've not over analysed this stuff for a while...

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Re: The Genesis Torpedo Should Have Tipped Over When Reliant Was Blast

...whether you could beam over...

Well, David Marcus clearly says "You can't".

Come to think of it, perhaps beaming anything anywhere inside the Mutara nebula is a bad idea, and David just gets to tell this to Kirk first, a few moments before Spock would have said the very thing.

Re: The Genesis Torpedo Should Have Tipped Over When Reliant Was Blast

The one thing speaking against that is that Uhura was sending messages of "Prepare to be boarded" for several minutes before the subject of "You can't" arose. Why did Spock say nothing? Was he thinking that Kirk's parties could board the Reliant via shuttles, spacewalks or hard docking even though the transporters were out of the question? Or that Kirk was bluffing for some reason and it was not Spock's place to point out the weaknesses of the bluff?

Mind you, it would be advantageous to send Khan the standard Starfleet surrender ultimatum even if there were practical problems with it. Kirk should press his advantage, and asking the impossible from the defeated party is good psychology that asserts Kirk's dominance.